A little more than a week ago, The Washington Post and The Guardian released information about an NSA program called PRISM, which purportedly allowed the NSA to have “direct access” to user data. After Facebook, Google, Apple, and others issued blanket refutations of that "direct access" claim, it was difficult to parse what PRISM really entailed. This morning, however, the AP published a long article with more details about how that program works.

The AP interviewed "more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts," all of whom confirmed that PRISM was more of a mechanism to hone the waterhose of data that the NSA has been gathering. In fact, the AP reports that the NSA is tapping directly into international fiber optic cables and collecting all that information. PRISM, on the other hand, is used to “narrow and focus” that massive stream of information. Once the NSA decides on a target, it will contact Internet companies like Facebook and Google to pinpoint the suspect. The AP writes:

If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious e-mail among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every e-mail, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

In connection to the recent PRISM news, Facebook published a post on Friday night, writing that it has “been in discussions with US national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with.”

Facebook continued. “We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all US national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters)—which until now no company has been permitted to do.” Despite the positive tone, Facebook could not disclose how many of the requests for user data that it received were from federal, state, or local authorities, nor could it detail whether any federal letters were from the NSA, a FISA court, the FBI, or some other entity. Facebook said that overall it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from authorities in the second half of 2012, which pertained to between 18,000 and 19,000 individual Facebook accounts.

Microsoft posted a similar message alleging that it “received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas, and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from US governmental entities (including local, state, and federal).”

Although Facebook said its report reflected something “no company has been able to do,” it should be noted that Google and Twitter have been releasing transparency reports revealing user data requests from federal authorities for some time. Facebook's claims to uniqueness seem to stem from the fact that the feds are allowing it to incorporate FISA requests into its summary of requests as well as National Security Letters (NSLs).

Snowden in Hong Kong

Also on Friday, Hong Kong paper South China Morning Postpublished an interview with Edward Snowden, which took place in at “a secret location in the city." Snowden told the paper that the NSA has been “hacking computers” in Hong Kong and mainland China “since 2009.” The Post seemed to indicate that Snowden showed the reporters he spoke with some documents confirming this information, but the paper says it was not able to verify them. The paper noted that “none of the documents revealed any information about Chinese military systems.”

The Post also said Snowden believed that the NSA was conducting “more than 61,000 hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.”

“We hack network backbones–like huge Internet routers, basically–that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” Snowden reportedly told the Post. That comment would support the AP's latest breakdown of the NSA's Internet spying scheme.

The Post also asked Snowden if he had been offered asylum by the Russian government. He responded, “My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power.”

Snowden told the paper that he plans to stay in Hong Kong “until I am asked to leave.”

“I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts, because I have faith in HK’s rule of law,” he said.

That attitude has garnered Snowden a lot of support from Hong Kong residents as well. Today, the same paper followed a Hong Kong rally that organizers estimated gathered about 900 people in support of Snowden. The protesters demanded answers from the US regarding the allegations of spying and asked Hong Kong's government to protect the whistleblower.

The Post interviewed some rally participants, including 40-year-old clerk Virginia Yau. "What has happened has shown us that the US is spying on the whole world,” she said. “We are marching for Snowden to let him know that he is not alone." Frank Lam, a 28-year-old auditor, added, "I think Snowden has told us the truth and we have a responsibility to protect his core values.”